


Center to Center

by Ephemera_pop (Alex_Draven)



Category: Popslash
Genre: AU, Libraries, M/M, archives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-30
Updated: 2005-05-30
Packaged: 2018-10-16 19:09:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10577676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex_Draven/pseuds/Ephemera_pop
Summary: "You don't understand."  Alex – Dr Mclean – interrupted."No, Dr Mclean, I think, perhaps, that you don't. These are very fragile unique documents we are talking about. I'm sorry if it is inconvenient to you, but their long-term preservation is my first priority."The man's expression made Lance's heart sink. He could hear himself being stuffy, obstructive, hide bound and rule bound, and Alex's reaction looked akin to infuriated impatience. So much for young, desirable and devastating arriving at his office door like a gift-wrapped fantasy.Alex's hand, warm and firm on Lance's wrist took him completely by surprise.   "Please, Mr Bass."





	

**Author's Note:**

> One library/archive AU for trumpeterofdoom who's request was summed up by the elegant equation boys + books = HOT, which I think is entirely self evident ;)

"Hey."

Lance looked up from the volume in the clamp, and blinked for a moment at the vision leaning against his workroom door. He pushed his glasses back into position and looked again. Slender, handsome, with dark hair and goatee, dancing eyes, and forearms covered in tattoos where his shirt was pushed back. Damn.

  
"I'm looking for Mr Bass – am I in the right place."

Lance swallowed and hopped off his stool, brushing his hands on his thighs as he stepped forward to shake his visitor by the hand.

"You do indeed. Lance Bass – pleasure to meet you."

His handshake was firm and the slide of his fingertips over Lance's palm made Lance repress a shiver. He really needed to get a grip. Or get laid more often. Possibly both, but right now, at work, he needed to focus.

"Alex Mclean. Can I steal a moment of your time? I know you're a busy man, but it is important."

"Please - come in." Lance gestured towards the desk on the far side of the room. "Let me just…." He moved the stack of solander boxes that had been taking up the second chair, depositing them on an empty fragment of worktable, and gestured to the resultant space. "I'd offer you a drink, but as you can see – my office is my workroom. So. What can I do for you, Mr Mclean?"

"Doctor, but please, call me Alex."

Lance nodded, and tried not to notice the way that Alex's crossed-leg position drew his jeans tight over his thighs.

"Your colleagues in circulation tell me you might have something that I need. A collection of Browning's letters, to be exact. Or part of it."

Lance held up one finger to indicate 'a moment please' and closed his eyes, mentally riffling his internal catalogue. Everything in the workrooms was docketed and signed for, but once they came under his care, he tended to rely on his own recall.

"Ah – yes! – Part of the Ethelridge archive, aren’t they? Total state – still with clips on, if you can believe."

"Yes, that's them!" Alex leant forward in is chair, and his enthusiasm just shone out of him. "Can I see them? I must see them!"

The avaricious tone of the last remark set Lance slightly on edge, and it came through in his voice. "Hardly. They're still very fragile – we've hardly started. Certainly not ready to go back to the reading rooms. Won't be for months, I should…"

"You don't understand." Alex – Dr Mclean – interrupted.

"No, Dr Mclean, I think, perhaps, that you don't. These are very fragile unique documents we are talking about. I'm sorry if it is inconvenient to you, but their long-term preservation is my first priority."

The man's expression made Lance's heart sink. He could hear himself being stuffy, obstructive, hide bound and rule bound, and Alex's reaction looked akin to infuriated impatience. So much for young, desirable and devastating arriving at his office door like a gift-wrapped fantasy.

Alex's hand, warm and firm on Lance's wrist took him completely by surprise. "Please, Mr Bass."

"Lance." Lance murmured, unable to take his eyes off the visual evidence of this unprecedented contact.

"Lance. Will you let me explain? Please – just hear me out. I understand that you need to protect your archives, but I think, perhaps, there's more to it than that."

Lance was speechless. When he dared to look up, the man facing him was earnest, eyes wide, and his fingers stoked gently over the sensitive skin of Lance's inner wrist, where the blood thumped close to the skin.

Alex nodded a little, and Lance wondered exactly how much of himself he was giving away.

*****

It was awkward, at first, sharing his workspace with another man. Perhaps it would have been with anyone, Lance was so used to working alone, just himself and his books and boxes and tools and the small radio on the windowsill for background noise. With Alex, all passion and dedication and lack of respect for the established order when it got in the way; with Alex who he had desired from the second he'd appeared in the doorway; it was almost impossible. The first day of their arrangement was torture; a mess of half-started sentences and excruciating moments and the sort of self-consciousness Lance had thought he had outgrown in school.

It didn’t help at all that Dr Mclean was nothing but pleasant; warm and friendly and appreciative of Lance's work, quiet and focussed and all in all the perfect assistant, which left Lance with nothing but certainty that any and all awkwardness was entirely his own fault. . He had spent the entire duration of Alex's second cigarette break pinching himself and berating himself for letting anyone distract him this badly. The third he took as an opportunity to flee to the bathrooms and take himself in hand, face burning at the indignity of the situation, hating the overwhelming nature of his feelings.

He couldn't bring himself to hate the object of those feelings, though. Far from it. The man had gained his professional respect that first afternoon, when Alex had volunteered a substantial amount of time as a volunteer conservator in exchange for access to his documents and confessed to a long standing love affair with ephemera collections, with letters of reference from two different university libraries to back up his claims. He'd engaged Lance's curiosity with the story of the subject of his research as much as with the few hints he dropped about his own life, and their correspondence after that first meeting had only fanned the flames. Now, working along side Alex, that curiosity was far from sated, but everything about the man's dedication, his focus, his care with the documents and his excitement as the character of the correspondents was slowly uncovered, gave Lance more to admire, more to like.

By the second week he was starting to relax in Alex's company, and by the third anyone passing the door of the workroom would have heard occasional laughter and the almost constant low murmur of voices. As their friendship developed, four days a week in the workroom, and increasingly, lunch breaks and after work drinks, Lance felt increasingly guilty about his fantasies, although entirely unable to stop.

He catalogued everything he could while they worked. Alex's long fingered hands, stroking lovingly over rows of fresh bindings, his lip red between white teeth when he was concentrating, his narrow hips, and the definition of his arms when he striped off to his undershirt in the heat of the day. The way his laugh started low and ends in giggles, the way he touches Lance, on the shoulder, the arm, the back of his neck, to get his attention. How he raises his coke can in a toast at the start of every meal, and how he's remembered how Lance takes his coffee and that he doesn't care for chocolate when it's hot. Lance stored all these moments away, and at night, when his room was unbearable in the close summer heat and the sheet stuck to his skin and sleep was a desperate memory, he turned them over in his mind, elaborating and explaining and imaging exactly how the sweat that gleamed along Alex's hairline would taste under Lance's tongue.

*****

"Yes!!"

Alex's explosion ripped through the quiet concentration of the workroom, and Lance's awl skittered across the surface of the board he was working on.

"Yes! Oh yes!" Alex carolled, and before Lance could ask there was a hot arm around his waist and he was pulled off his stool and into an impromptu waltz of triumph. Alex's laughter was contagious, and they were so ridiculous, twirling in the cluttered gap between desk and workbench, that Lance couldn't help but join him.

"What? What?"

"The letter? Letters! They're there, and – oh Lance – they're there and I was right. They were lovers, Lance – you hear me? Lovers!"

Lance's head spun, putting this altogether. Alex's research wasn't Browning, but another Edwardian chemist, Edmund Jackson, who he believed had been a friend of Brownings, and, he'd suggested, perhaps more than that. An opinion that put Alex in direct opposition to most of his peers, who had dismissed his early articles as wishful revisionism, which threatened his teaching position, his whole career. Finding the evidence like this was –

Alex's lips burned brand-hot against his own for just a second, and all Lance's thoughts vanished.

"Thank you, thank you so much, oh, God, Lance! They're here!" Alex continued to babble, beaming, his legs laced with Lance's and his hands locked in the small of Lance's back; continuing to talk, to move, to breath, as though he'd never kissed him.

It wasn't even a conscious movement, there was no moment Lance could look back to and say: that, there, that was the moment I chose to act. Just one second he was laughing at Alex's enthusiasm, and the next he was kissing Alex, raw heat and need and longing. And then there was a tiny frozen moment of realisation and terror, before those long fingered hands were splayed across Lance's back and neck, and Alex's tongue was tasting him, returning the kisses, deepening them, and Lance was flying.

Flying on every chemical his body could throw at him, and every touch, every taste just sparked another cascade of sensation. Oh, God, Alex was perfection, lithe and hard and eager, and even though he was the taller man, it was Lance who crashed back first into the wall, Alex's hands buried in his hair.

They broke apart, panting, and Lance couldn't imagine that his own expression was any less wild, any less hungry, than Alex's, and there were no words, only fingers cupping his face. Lance nodded, frantically, fervently, and Alex's mouth took his again, gentle for one electrifying second that tasted of peppermint and ecstasy, before need shot through them both once more, demanding tongue and teeth and grinding.

Alex's leg was wrapped around Lance's thigh, high and tight, bringing their hips into alignment, and no power on earth could have stopped Lance rolling up and in and keening when, oh fuck yes! When the pressure was there and hot and perfect and the answering bulk of Alex's erection slid against him, denim on cotton, dragging hisses from both of them. It was too much, every daydream, every fantasy, every pornographic imagining coming true in his arms, and his nose full of paste and leather and dust. Lance was shaking already, blood thundering and his fingers pulling tight, pushing damp cotton away, so his fingertips could slip in the summer sweat of the small of Alex's back.

There were answering fingers dragging on his own skin, forcing their way under his shirt, to his chest, his neck, and Alex's hips rolled back against him, striking a rhythm so fast, so urgent, so unmistakable Lance could only accept, surrender to it. When Alex came he bit down on Lance's lip: the world went dark, and Lance didn't even feel the pain, only the rush, and he froze, arched between the wall and Alex's clinging self.

When he could breathe again – when they can both breathe again - panting, laughing, oh-my-god shivering sensitivity breaths, Alex was still there, pressed so close there was no separation at all, and Lance had no idea – no idea at all – what to say. What to say, what to do, how to do anything accept stare in wonder and hope he hadn't just ruined his life entirely.

Alex's fingers stroking gently over his face are benediction enough to release Lance's words, which were nothing that made sense. '"God" and "Alex" and "Oh" but it was "Sorry" which broke the spell, "sorry" which was stolen from his lips by Alex's pressed firm against them.

"No, no Lance, not that. No sorries. Not for. God." Alex panted, and it was just so much, so perfect, that Lance inexplicably wanted to cry. He buried his face in Alex's shoulder, wrapping both arms around his slight body instead. "Thank you." He breathed. "Thank you."


End file.
